Former special counsel Robert Mueller has considered speaking out publicly to defend the Russia investigation for months, according to a new report.
After Mueller wrote an opinion piece published by the Washington Post over the weekend in response to President Trump commuting Roger Stone’s prison sentence, CNN reported sources who said the former FBI director has been thinking about breaking his silence since the Justice Department moved to drop its charges against retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
Both Stone and Flynn were targets of Mueller’s investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Neither was charged with criminal conspiracy, and critics of the special counsel’s work have argued it was a “witch hunt” using process crimes to take down Trump allies.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to FBI investigators about his December 2016 conversations with a Russian envoy. After changing legal teams, Flynn began to claim this year that he was set up by the FBI, after which the DOJ said in early May it would seek to drop the case. The matter is now playing out in the courts.
The new report said Mueller was cajoled into action by the White House attacks on the investigation in justifying Stone’s commutation.
The White House released a statement Friday evening announcing that Trump had signed a grant of clemency, calling Stone a “victim of the Russia Hoax.”
Stone, a 67-year-old longtime confidant of Trump, had been convicted of lying to congressional investigators about his alleged outreach to WikiLeaks, obstructing a congressional investigation, and attempting to intimidate a possible congressional witness. With the commutation, Stone’s 40-month sentence, supervised release, and unpaid fine were wiped away days before he was set to go to prison. Without a pardon, Stone maintains his criminal record.
In the opinion article, Mueller’s first public remarks since his testimony before Congress in July 2019, he wrote that Stone “remains a convicted felon, and rightfully so” and stressed that his team “made every decision in Stone’s case, as in all our cases, based solely on the facts and the law and in accordance with the rule of law. The women and men who conducted these investigations and prosecutions acted with the highest integrity. Claims to the contrary are false.”
